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Window-Dressing Warriors

David Hoey and Linda Fargo, who design Bergdorf Goodman’s windows. “We take our frivolity very seriously,” Mr. Hoey said.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

SOMETHING apparently stolen from Bergdorf Goodman was on display in the window of Juicy Couture’s store on Fifth Avenue during Fashion Week in September: a mannequin with one very long arm draped with a half-dozen headphones.

No need to involve the police, fashion or otherwise; the mannequin belonged to Juicy. But the concept was clearly lifted — let’s call it a homage — from an acclaimed 2003 Bergdorf window, a solitary, black-clad mannequin with a 15-foot-long arm that dangled 26 different handbags.

That mannequin became famous among window designers for pulling off a nifty trick: it was at once minimalist and over the top, a bare-bones visual that celebrated indulgence.

The designer behind that display, David Hoey, along with his predecessor and current boss-slash-collaborator, Linda Fargo, have managed a similarly notable feat during their 14 years at Bergdorf. During that period, they have earned Bergdorf a reputation for decadent, intellectual art pieces that tickle both street crowds and museum snobs alike.

“This job is part architect and part cake designer,” said Mr. Hoey, a balding Truman Capote type with a Texas drawl who favors spectacles, vests and rolled-up shirtsleeves. “We take our frivolity very seriously.”

To wit: a 2009 holiday display in which a mannequin wearing an Alexander McQueen dress stood before an assortment of spiral staircases, ranging in scale from dollhouse to penthouse, winding in and out of tiny dioramas. It looked like an M. C. Escher drawing come to life.

“The most complex window in the history of window display,” Mr. Hoey called it, “and I should know.” Mr. Hoey spent years collecting staircases and months designing the display on a computer.

Their work is now being honored not just in the windows of Juicy Couture, but in a coffee table book published this month by Assouline. Called “Windows at Bergdorf Goodman,” the 14-by-17-inch, 144-page monolith retails for $550. (Hurry, only 1,000 will be printed.)

“Display is a certain branch of show business and theater and storytelling,” Mr. Hoey said as he and Ms. Fargo flipped through a copy of “Windows” in a conference room deep inside Bergdorf on a recent afternoon.

“Are we worried about specifically selling merchandise?” he asked. “No, we don’t think that way. We’re just focusing on the art and the characters. That part takes care of itself.”

Window display as art form dates to the 1940s, when Gene Moore introduced humor and storytelling to his windows at Tiffany & Company and the now-defunct Bonwit Teller department store. A typical Moore display featured a two-headed mannequin “who’d grown a second head because she liked hats so much,” Mr. Hoey said.

Andy Warhol brought his pop art to Bonwit Teller’s windows in the 1960s, and Bloomingdale’s Candy Pratts Price gained notoriety in the 1970s with shocking displays that gestured toward sadomasochism.

Simon Doonan shook the ’80s out of its beige-hued stupor when he went to Barneys in 1986. His windows were, and occasionally still are, caustic, satirical commentaries about pop culture and celebrity.

“Simon is downright not nice sometimes,” said Anne Kong, associate professor of visual presentation and exhibit design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She recalled Mr. Doonan’s unflattering depictions of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles during their New York visit in 2005. “There’s an ‘eek’ factor where he makes viewers sometimes just wince. ‘Irreverent’ is a key word to understanding Simon.”

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At Bergdorf, that key word is “luxury,” or at least it is now. When Ms. Fargo arrived in 1996, Bergdorf had lost touch with modern tastes, and was undergoing a $50 million face-lift that included a renewed focus on luxe brands and boutiques.

Ms. Fargo advertised the rejuvenation with glamorous window displays that presented the store as a fantasyland of consumerism. She hired Mr. Hoey as her production designer later that same year.

Ms. Fargo and Mr. Hoey “are neck and neck as the iconic window designers of today” alongside Mr. Doonan, Mrs. Kong said. Though Mr. Hoey insists there is no friction between the two stores and its designers. “We’re asked that all the time,” he said, “but there is no rivalry between the two stores because their personalities are so different.”

Indeed, “Linda and David are all about beauty, sophistication, glamour, indulgence,” Mrs. Kong said. “Simon loves to cross that line.”

Since 2003, Ms. Fargo has been vice president in charge of women’s fashion and store presentation. Mr. Hoey has taken over the day-to-day operation of the windows, working out of a workshop on the eighth floor of Bergdorf cluttered with ventriloquist dummies and animal heads. He is assisted by five full-time workers and a rotating cast of carpenters, puppeteers and paper folders.

Designing at Bergdorf brings with it some other natural advantages. The store’s Fifth Avenue windows are remarkably high — 13 feet, compared with a standard 8 feet among most display windows. That height allows for some grand executions, like a pair of slim mannequins standing before a blackboard wearing six-foot dunce caps (Title: “Fashion school”).

And one of the windows on 57th street is 20 feet wide, which Mr. Hoey said was the inspiration for the 2003 mannequin with the 15-foot arm. “It was the best use we could think of for a 20-foot-wide window,” he said.

Ms. Fargo and Mr. Hoey don’t have to worry about making windows that can be recreated at 1,000 stores nationwide, as a window designer at, say, the Gap or Victoria Secret might. (There it’s called “Visual Merchandising.”) Each window is a one-shot deal, which leaves a lot more room for craft and creativity.

But the point of their work is that it does not require a degree in window design to appreciate. George Lois, the advertising executive and designer of famous Esquire covers, said he would visit their windows on his lunch break when he worked on 57th street in the 1990s.

Their work “is like great package design,” Mr. Lois said. “You say: ‘This is the store I want to shop at. There’s going to be some fantasy and excitement.’ ”

Still, even a full-time fashionista like Ms. Fargo occasionally dreams of a less commercial venue for her art. She recalled telling The New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham several years ago that she wished she could mount some of her displays in a proper gallery.

“And he said, ‘Oh child, why would you do that?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘You have the best art gallery in all the world.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on November 4, 2010, on Page E11 of the New York edition with the headline: Window Dressing Warriors. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe